Introduction

As the idea of creating my own Anime Database sparked within me, I set out to create parse data from an existing website, MyAnimeList, since I utilize it a lot for managing the content I parse through my mind.

I was dumbfounded when I realized that the official API did not support for fetching anime or manga details. There was a way to do this via the official API but it was totally round-about. You had to use one of their API endpoints where you searched for a query and it would return a list of similar anime/manga with their details.

I could have used AniList’s API but I was already familiar with scraping data. I’ve done this before in a lot of former projects. And so I set out to develop Jikan to fulfill my parent goal; to make my own anime database. And so it took a project of it’s own.

History

Jikan was uploaded to GitHub on January the 11th with a single function of scraping anime data.

It wasn’t even called ‘Jikan’ back then, it was called the ‘Unofficial MAL API’. Quite generic, I know.

I came to terms with the name ‘Jikan’ as it was the only domain name available for the .me TLD and it’s a commonly used word in Japanese – ‘Time’. The ‘Plan A’ name was ‘Shiro’, but unfortunately everyone seemed to have hogged all the TLDs for it.

With this API, I guess you could say I’d be saving developers some … Jikan – Heh.

Enter;Jikan

Sounds like a title from the Steins;Gate multiverse.

Anyways, Jikan can provide these details from MAL simply by their ID on MAL

Anime

Manga

Character

Person

These are the implemented functions as of now. There are some further planned features.

Search Results

The official API does support this. However;

The response is in XML

It only shows the results of the first page

Jikan will change that by showing results for whatever page you select. And oh – it returns in JSON.

Is that it?

Mostly, yes. The reason this API was developed to provide very easy access to developers to data which isn’t supported by the official API. And there you go.

There’s been delays but it’s here. The Alpha version of the CS2D log data extractor, Project.Extract Cloud, is up and running. There’s are some stuff left to do. I’ll explain this in a second.

Other than that you can only extract 1 file. I might as well set this as the limit. I’m gratified to be hosted for free by BroHosting as a testing for their hosting services and so far there’s absolutely no critical problems.

WHAT YOU SHOULD CHECK OUT!

That would be the server statistics functionality. The core of the application lies within there. Feel free to drop in whatever log of your choice and get as much as information out of it as possible!

TODO!

Text Searching

The text searching page right now is bare minimum, it’s simply 5% done. It’ll look more polished and organized like the ‘server statistics’ page.

User Database

User database will be a offline feature only of PE4, it’ll automatically store player information as a database for you to easily access.

Server Statistics Polishing

As complete as it looks, it’s still a bit far from done. First off, the map graph you see is a complete dummy. It’s not implemented at all. Secondly, there are some design polishing I need to do. Apart from that I want to see if I can fit in more data and graphs in there.

Usage Statistics

You’ve probably noticed a blank space in the black bar at the top after you click it. What’s meant to be stored there is a graph of your usage statistics of the browser app. The core functionality of this is complete but I’m planning to add the graphs and such at the end.

PRIVACY

Some of you might be wondering about the log files that you’re uploading to the server. I’ll let you know before hand that these log files are stored. The reason for this is that they’re cached incase you reload the page. An JSON format of the extracted contents are stored as well.

When I release beta, what I said will still be applicable to your offline version of Project.Extract but the cloud version won’t store anything. Nothing will be cached.

Well, it has been quite a while since my last post. Which was infact about me working on a CMS. To be quite frank I sort of ditched that project, for now. Lots happened, one would be ditching windows xp (well, it’s still installed side-by-side with ubuntu) and fetching a developer’s based OS. All I can say is that Ubuntu is perfect.

It’s 5.21 in the morning and I’m still managing with new additions. So, what’s this post about? Well first off, it’s a fangirling post and second off, some new stuff I had to adapt to as a web developer.

This is one of the projects I’ve been working on. It is quite bigger than my CMS project. Rather than storing the theme links and information in configuration files and parsing it from there, this is directly done from the database via mySQLi.

A thing about Ubuntu I love is the mass amount of virtual desktops you can create. See all those tabs in the task bar? They’re all OPEN. Except on a different desktop. I can switch desktops easily as Alt + (left/right or mouse scroll).

Another best thing is the light weight LXQT Desktop feature. It’s still in alpha phase as of my writing but it’s still modifiable and I’ll be using this forever probably. Note: I’m running on an old potato with 512mb ram with these features. I’m quite amazed. This is probably the most normal reaction for a windows -> ubuntu migrating individual.

Instead of using phpmyadmin, I’ve taken a step forward and am doing mostly everything from bash command line. It’s easy to adapt to and quite fun.

One thing I had to adapt to was file paths and the permissions stuff. They’re easy once you get to understand them but one thing with requiring/including files in PHP is that you have to do them from the base.

You can’t include a file like this: <?php require ‘core/framework.php’ ?>

Alright! So I managed to complete the article module as well as the theme module! The theme module will be able to load any theme given that it’s properly configured as I said in my previous post. Other than that I have made a default template for it which is even responsive (yay!). I’ll be completing the template along the rest of the completion of the CMS. So far that’s left is the design, admin panel and the articles page. The articles page shouldn’t take long. I would be needing to implementing a url parser for that, which reminds me! I managed to implement pretty urls for the pages after a thirty minute struggle on how to fix the broken style sheets and index links.

Unlike my prototype articles class, this one loads directly from a database using mysqli.
And stores the articles that are to be shown on the page in a public array, which can be called in the index page after calling the Articles Class. Doing this serves that you’d be able to use in any theme you add wherever.

Well, it has been a while since my last update due to some unforeseen circumstances (laptop got #rekt lol). This shall be my first update since then. The way my portfolio was currently was the epitome of a mess. Fonts lingering over 3~ MB in download size which were killing the user’s bandwidth as well as some parts of the design being a bit off. And of course, some backhand left un-done.

In the time being of a few hours I managed to re-gift the portfolio a sense of design and patched up some ends. I still haven’t worked on the administration panel, but who cares about that, it’s not like anyone else other than me requires it.

Some design changes included the navigational area as well as the fixed avatar of myself I had. That and the introduction area. I removed that and added a context of my awesome name with a crap ton of padding plus a slide down link towards the portfolio.

The portfolio was already almost finished last time. This time I just added a better download backhand to keep track of download hits as well as the counter showing in on the button. The icons are now to the left of the text.

The ‘About Me’ section is pretty much the same, except I increased the percentage in my visual skill set levels. lawl

Other than that I pondered a good 20 minutes on the submit button for the contact area. The button style was making me cringe so I suppose this one might as well be ‘The One’ currently…hopefully.

I suppose that’s it.
Oh, did I mention I got a new theme for Sublime Text? I swear this makes everything I write significantly even more beautiful. *~*

So far I had no clue how to manage themes, but after a little pondering I managed to come up with a solution. I was too lazy to google it anyways and I believe this solution fits me best because I created it. No, I do not care whether it is an actual method, I manifested it within my own ideologies so therefore; it is mein.

Anyhows, this is pretty much how it will manage the templates.
So it will load themes as theme1,theme2,theme3 and so on using the swagging configuration parser. Now using the values of the keys, I’ll take control of the explode() function with the delimiter of ‘.‘ to get the correct values.

This would be a prototype of how the themes ‘database’ would be like. If you’re wondering what the ‘.pb‘ extension is, that’s the CMS’s own configuration extension abbreviated as ‘project blog‘.

So yeah, I suppose this concludes the theory behind the themes management module. I will update what goes in the upcoming posts. It might be of another module as I lack the ability to finish one module at a time and I usual end up doing bits and pieces of everything all together. Oh well.

And so while I took the last sip of my everlasting (somewhat) dew, an idea struck of why not go in all the way? (no innuendo intended) Dedicating time to develop a functioning CMS. Time is something I probably have right now, so why not? It would not be a complex CMS like WordPress, Joomla or whatsoever. However a minor one, that would classify as my first. (Again, no innuendo intended)

And I started off with a directory of what I’ll be currently needing. So far at the roof of the directory I have index, admin, article & a error page with two more directories; interface & core. The interface directory will be dealing with themes and the core directory will, obviously, be dealing with the main thing itself.

The index page will be implemented with the top first 5 articles with the pagination system I developed a few days ago.
The article page will deal with per article display. Whatever article the user chooses to visit would be displayed there.
The error page will deal with error re-directs, mostly from the .htaccess file.
And so far, lastly, the admin page. I’ll be developing this in the end however. This page, you guessed it, will deal with administration stuff.

The core will contain these classes:

class.articles.php

class.database.php

class.theme.php

class.parser.php

class.admin.php

As you probably guessed it, multiple themes will be something I’ll be implementing. I developed a prototype of this a while back and it’s something that my portfolio right now uses. Although I haven’t really implemented other templates other than the current one yet.
Parser class will deal parsers that I may implement, here’s to one that I’m definitely implementing is my swagging configuration parser which will deal with template source links, titles and whatnot. I do not yet know If I should allow database credentials to be stored in here, it may be risky because security hole. But let’s see what do.

I have the whole night plus a leftover pizza left, let the project begin.